E. Blaauw, THE CONTRIBUTION OF PROSODIC BOUNDARY MARKERS TO THE PERCEPTUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN READ AND SPONTANEOUS SPEECH, Speech communication, 14(4), 1994, pp. 359-375
Listeners are able to tell apart read-aloud and spontaneously produced
speech. Prosody appears to be important for this perceptual distincti
on. In this paper, the importance of the distribution and realization
of prosodic boundaries is investigated. Recordings were made of five m
ale speakers, spontaneously producing so-called instruction monologues
. Transcripts of these monologues were read aloud by the same speakers
. A perception experiment was carried out to obtain classification sco
res for isolated utterances selected from the spontaneous and read mat
erial. Auditory prosodic transcriptions were made of the entire sponta
neous and read monologues, assessing the distribution and realization
of underlying prosodic boundaries in both speech types. The underlying
prosodic structure was assessed by means of an automatic text-to-spee
ch system. Observed differences in the production of prosodic boundari
es in the spontaneous and read material are related to the perceptual
classification scores by means of a multiple regression analysis. Resu
lts show a significant correlation, suggesting that differences in the
distribution and realization of prosodic boundaries contribute signif
icantly to the perceptual difference between spontaneous and read spee
ch.